Simon Fox, chief executive of the publishing and art fair group Frieze, has a confession. “I would have been a magician, had I not come last in a competition when I was 18,” he says over Zoom from Buckinghamshire. It is tempting to suggest that joining an events-based business at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic must need every trick in the book, but luckily Fox has other skills beyond his Magic Circle endorsement.
His recent senior roles — as chief executive of the music and books business HMV Group and of Reach, the UK’s largest commercial news publisher — mean that Fox knows plenty about industries facing digital disruption. The healthy looking 60-year-old father of three seems quietly to relish a challenge. “I never set out to jump from frying pans into fires. But it is fair to say that I am more comfortable facing headwinds than just driving in a straight line,” he says.
Fox seems a good fit for Frieze, which has grown far beyond its niche beginnings in 1991 as a magazine about contemporary art. By the start of 2020, when Fox was headhunted to…
